Another crap meme made with AI, yay, I love AI slop
Surprised there’s no one in the comments going bat shit crazy that this was made by AI. Are we not doing that anymore?
Character development ❤️
“Can we jazz it up a bit?”
This is a real request from a real manager. They have played us for absolute fools.
Customer requirements are basically always “I want what my Excel sheet used to do”.
“You mean you want it to corrupt your data and end up with conflicting changes once you share it?”
Make sure to convert
1/2toFebruaryI want faster horses.
TBF if the spreadsheet works, why change anything?
They change it because they need more money. (talking about Excel here)
And soon you’ll see ads in the fn suggestions drop down
and ads in unused cells
and ads while the Solver is running (made in VisualBasic, running on top of WebAssembly, running on interpreted Python, using a Java Interpreter on your Web Browser to make sure you watch the ad for as long as possible)And that’s why we need to make our own spreadsheet software.
You know what we, in the industry, call a detailed specification fo requirements detailed enough to produce software? Code.
If those project managers could read, they would actually be able to use Jira.
I regret what I wrote.
I realised, just being able to read, doesn’t make sure they can actually use Jira
AI Project Manager: Create a button on a webpage that, when clicked, displays an alert saying “Hello World!”
AI Programmer: “What a sensible requirement! Here you go.”
AI Billing Department: “Project completed, that’ll be 10 million dollars.”
Client AI Payments Department: “Sounds right, paid!”I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.
My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.
When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.
Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.
Heh, that won’t stop a C-level from thinking that you just write code.
Yeah, that’s probably true. Remember how all the execs decided to replace cashiers with robots, then the stores started losing money because a. it made stealing a lot easier and b. people would avoid stores that only had self-checkout robots and never had anyone to help you because a robot doesn’t know where the flour is. Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers. It turns out cashiers do more than just scan barcodes. But, upper management didn’t get to where they are by being smart.
Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers.
Maybe this is North American thing because in Europe they never really got rid of human cashiers, they just had the automated systems alongside the human cashiers.
I don’t know of any store that went over to 100% self-checkout
I hate shopping at Lowe’s now because they physically removed the regular checkouts and only have a square of self checkouts. They did this so one “cashier” can watch over everything, saving labor on multiple cashiers. They also paired down every other department so it’s just as hard (or possibly harder) to get assistance in a department as at Home Depot. Feels like I’m watch the death spiral in full swing.
Less shoppers means less staff. Less staff means service suffers. Poor service means less shoppers. Rinse and repeat. This is happening at almost every brick and mortar retail business though, not just Lowe’s. It’s like the entire economy has turned into Circuit City trying to keep the lights on.
I only know a single place with exactly two of them. The nearest Ikea. Other than those two it’s human cashiers everywhere.
I live in California, so any place that sells alcohol needs at least one real cashier. A lot of places took that “at least one” to be an upper limit, not a lower one. For a while there, going into Albertsons was a nightmare. Twenty minutes shopping, another twenty waiting to check out because everybody had alcohol.
My local grocery store has half the self checkouts they installed permanently disabled, and plans to remove them. They never got rid of human cashiers, but they misjudged the optimal ratio of selfcheck/cashier way too heavily on the self check side.
They also underestimated how lazy people are. Personally I will never use a self checkout if a have a bunch of produce (which is most trips to the grocery store). I can’t be bothered to slowly look up each item in their database.
Wait, you guys don’t have scanners to scan your items?
Never had to look anything up in a database while shopping.
Your produce has barcodes printed on it?
Yep. When I was a cashier in a grocery store, I had every code memorized except some of the less popular bulk nuts. A human cashier is way faster than a self checkout.
That’s why the best places to work tend to be the places where your CEO has had your job before.
It’s no guarantee. I tell you, the CEO position is like a poison to the brain. My company CEO is so hopped up on LLMs I’m highly suspecting that his slack messages are written by an LLM.
That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.
That’s a good analogy, I will use that.
Full self driving… NOW.
See. It can turn the steering wheel on is own. Feature complete!!
The problem is that the CEO who believes he just writes code probably believes all a bus driver does is turn the steering wheel.
Is that because they themselves don’t do much work all day either?
That’s the same people that never figured out using blinkers or speed limits so that sounds about right.
It could also be possible that AI doesn’t write code but becomes the new software. Hook it up to libraries, contractions, databases and pump it full of the verbatim ramblings from the client, sales guy and manager. Sure, it costs a magnitude more power to run but it’s up in no time.
Then hire a few consultants that used to be senior engineers for an outrageous amount to trace the weird hallucinations and replace the mission critical part with real code.
The future is going to be wacko.
That’s the way it’s going now. People are making agentic stuff. Even in my company people are experimenting on something like that. Setup an agent, hook it up to the APIs and let loose.
It won’t automate your job, but isn’t it already replacing junior devs via team downsizing?
Any place that is replacing junior devs with AI is probably going to really regret it when they have no senior devs in a few years. Being a junior dev in a team is kind of like an apprenticeship. You learn the trade, but you also learn the shop. Then when the senior dev moves on, you have all that knowledge and can step into the role of senior dev. If a team decides to not have junior devs anymore, then they’ll have no one to take over when a senior dev leaves.
So the answer is yes, it is already replacing junior devs, but that’s only because management hasn’t learned how bad of an idea that is yet. Ultimately, it will cost them more through losing foundational team knowledge.
You also have to hold an AI’s hand the entire way through coding something, whereas you can kind of just let a junior dev go do their own thing, and eventually they’ll probably get it right. An AI “agent” tries to hold its own hand, but that doesn’t seem to work out usually when I’ve tried it. It starts making changes that are really bad, then just seems to always double down and eventually make a huge mess.
So I’m not wasting my time in college then?
I can’t answer that for you. I’ll tell you, I don’t think a computer science degree is a waste.
Last company I worked for and now contract for, explicitly set out to hire promising juniors over seniors. Reason being, they had to fire a guy with nearly a decade of experience because he was completely unable to adapt and learn new things, so his experience was all doing the same stuff over and over again.
A small company that has cash reserves will absolutely hire a bright grad who can hold a conversation in the interview, only trouble is the ratio between candidates and job openings.
Whether or not you’re wasting your time in college is only something you can answer. However, there definitely are jobs out there for junior software devs right now. If economic outlooks improve, I’d expect demand for juniors to rise also.
Anecdote: I saw stats shared on social media by a CS professor at my former college. Enrollment for their classes is way down this year, when “back in my day” they were packed. Make of it what you will, but it’s possible young people might no longer be seeing software development as an easy career to get into. That could make it a more attractive prospect for someone who’s in it for more than just money.
Could AI allow you to write code in python, and then turn the python into a static language with static variables at least?
But the main benefits of static typing is in making the programming part easier. What do you gain from translating dynamically typed languages into a statically typed language?
I don’t see how that’s going to work out well. That’s asking to end up with a mess that you’re just going to have to rewrite anyways.
I do not even have a complete hatred for AI like a lot of folks do, but I don’t trust it that much (nor should anyone).
You’d be better off with an actual deterministic transpiler for that (think TypeScript -> JS but the other way around I suppose), not something with a ton of random variables like an AI.
A language to do what?
That is just programming with extra steps
Well python is slow due to garbage collection and dynamic types, if AI could fill those in it would make programming far easier at least.
You could write low level drivers in python.
presses button; nothing happens
“Well see here! I wanted that button to do something!”
“Oh but it did! It wasted your time as well as mine!”
“But I want it to do something other than that!”
The client wants to drag and drop their own personalized excel file with no guaranteed formatting or column order or data contract in order to import their data into our system <3
Needs more AI to randomly guess what the columns might be
I love how this is a universal experience.
Jesus, this gave me war flashbacks.
Please, do elaborate. Let others feast on your suffering.
May I?
A controlling department wasn’t granted any money for digitializing their workflow.
So these guys created their own solution(s!). Things like dedicated “user interfaces” loading data from tables created by hand. After years these people realized that data formatting is quite the issue.
They started to put random rules into different tables:
Two empty lines: New Group Data Record. One empty line: New Subgroup Data Record.
Excel tables aggregating this data via hardcoded links.
A dedicated table to start calculations on parent tables.
They mutated data like this:
Load data from excel files into one. Manually delete, add or change lines (or columns). Start a collection run from dedicated excel file and load new excel file data and replace old excel file data.
They had files where ‘it was easier to read’ when they pivot the data. This was troublesome since some values are intermediate results. Dropping one column may imply dropping another one as well.
All workflows required manual alignments along the way.
They were only able to process 10% of the data from a year within a year. Managing millions in cash.
Their data input came from different internal sources. Programs which were written two decades ago once and without any tests. Talking like VB, macro’s from host servers and copy-pasta data from other internal programs.
And don’t get me started on customer tables… They created a zip-code encoded filesystem hierarchy where each customer data (you guessed it, excel file) was renamed and then saved. In each of these directories where randomly named files if something went wrong; So no actual file patterns to rely on.
I respect them.
They creates a diagram for their tables with word. Word! (Didn’t know either: you can select the web view in the bottom right corner and you get an infitive canvas…) Madness.
Strangely enough we actually solved this problem with AI a few months back. We upload the excel file to Gemini and have a prompt to extract the data we need in a specific json format. And it works surprisingly well.
How well? Bet your life on it well, or “fewer hallucinations than we would have guessed” well? I’ve considered and toyed around with openAI models for logging supply room check offs in a JSON format and it went better than I hoped but worse than I needed.
Really well. Temp turned down all the way, and Gemini has this new feature to run and execute code… Not function calling… It can write a small python script, run it and return the output.
So our prompt explains the excel spreadsheet, then tell it exactly the format we need it in, and then tell it to use python and pandas to read in the CSV, clean it up and reshape it the way we need it to match what we expect and voila.
So hallucinations are not really and issue with the data as it’s simply writing code which then deterministically processes and returns the data.
Edit to add more info: basically Gemini can create and run a lambda function on the fly. And if you’re a coder you can really guide the prompt. Eg "load this into pandas. Then remove all the empty columns. Also remove the total rows. Now unpivot the data so the months are not columns but in separate rows with a column called month.
You get the idea.
Google thanks you for your data.
Holy smokes, how did I not think to turn the temperature down?! That’s smart! Thanks for getting back to me!
The second one. It is always the second one.
It would still have to be in at least somewhat of a consistent format. Even a human would require that.
If they’re just going to write the details however they feel on any particular day and then just expect someone or something to be able to interpret that they’re going to have a bad time.
Do we have the same client?
Everyone has and is that client.
Or headers. Just unlabeled data in a CSV.
Yep, RIP
Button that does something? That’s too advanced for me, I’ll use a library
Help, Debian has libbutton only in 1.4.3 and libdosomething is not in my repo. I compiled libdosomething from source, but now it needs libbutton >= 2.4.1 and compiling that version of libbutton fails, as my GCC and make are too old and incompatible!
I already tried it on my other PC, but that isn’t based on glibc, which makes all these dependencies even worse…
Have you tried unplugging your computer, going out into the woods, and returning to monke?
>return to:monke
ERROR: Restore point “monke” not found. Latest restore point is “shrew”, would you like to return to it instead?I need to make more frequent backups…
is that like an AUR package or something?
cries in left_pad
It’s kind of astonishing how many people leaned on that library just to add fucking spaces to strings
It should be in the standard library anyway. Why the hell is it not?!
I mean yeah, I can write my own function to do the same thing and probably I’ve done it at some point in some coding exercise as a beginner, but this seems like such a common thing to use, it should be in the standard library of any sane language.
It is, as padStart, which makes the number of packages using leftpad even more incomprehensible
No, the customer wants a button that does a very specific thing.
He can’t tell you what that is, though. You’re the expert!
Also, can you put in more ads? And make it so the users can’t close the tab until they bought something.You’re the expert!
I can do absolutely anything. I’m an expert!
make it so the users can’t close the tab until they bought something.
Why do they always request that? They’ve never seen any website on the internet work like that yet they actually think that they are the first people to come up with that idea.
This is when the AI, in a microsecond, decided to destroy the human race.
Not gonna lie, I don’t really blame the AI.
This is why we definitely shouldn’t rewrite the nuclear launch software. A project manager could unintentionally push a programmer into justifiably ending the fucking planet.
That’s when you load all middle managers onto a spaceship and send them off under the guise of colonising a new world.
I had a client once explain to me that his request for the 75% redesign of his mobile app would be simple because “it’s just 3 pages”
That was the exact quote
I know that was hardly related to the post, but it reminded me of that and I needed to vent to my therapist (aka strangers on Lemmy)
I feel you. Just ended coding “a little special case” that resulted in dozens of files changed, all because I refused to make it with dirty hidden hack, and that was a clear-cut technical if-branching even, no vague ideas
Talking to a client is times that amount of hurdle
Whoa whoa, hold on there! You can’t expect a product manager to come up with such detailed specs!
I am a product manager that loves coming up with detailed specs. How else will I actually get what I want? If you care about some specific behavior/outcome you must specify it. This logic is lost on my leadership.
